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Your Quick Tips, 29 September 2008

Keep the Date on Newspaper ClippingsI have been scanning obituaries from a file that my mother kept of family. I am most disturbed by the lack of date and sometimes name of the paper–just an old yellowed announcement and not even the year on most obituaries. When youâ€™re clipping newspaper articles to save, be sure to include the name and date of the newspaper. Â Nancy Cragun Day

Double-check Place Names I am using Family Tree Maker 2008 which I think is great as I have been able to add so much more to my tree with this version. I am looking forward to the 2009 update.

I would like to point out that you should be careful when entering the birth, death, marriage places info from “Hints” into your trees. I have found quite a few errors in other peoples trees that are a definite match with mine and I wonder if they accidentally just clicked on the wrong one. Â For example, ancestors who I know for sure were born, married, and died in the Kent, England, being shown as in a place with a similar place name like Kent, Connecticut, USA. Always double-check and make sure the type-ahead features didn’t choose the wrong location.

Regards, Judi Soutar-New Zealand

Label Your Genealogy Binders and Folders I’ve created labels to put on all of the genealogy binders and folders I bring with me to libraries or anywhere else I research. They include my name and phone number with the message that if anyone finds them to please call and that I will gladly reimburse the finder for return postage to mail them back to me. Hopefully, should I ever lose one, I’ll be able to get it back this way.

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: mailto:juliana@ancestry.com . Thanks to all of this week’s contributors!

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the â€œAncestry Weekly Journal,â€ please state so clearly in your message.

4 thoughts on “Your Quick Tips, 29 September 2008”

You might also keep a copy of Page 1 of the newspaper, as well as the entire page that the article or obituary occurs on. This gives you complete information, and if you wish to scan the items, you have the masthead for the newspaper available to add to your scan, the appropriate article or obituary, and the page the item was printed on.

For clipped obituaries it is also important to record the “day” of the newspaper issue in addition to the date. Newspapers sometimes report that John Smith died on Tuesday without giving the date for Tuesday. Having “Thursday, 18 Sep 2008″ on the clipped obituary makes it possible for a later researcher to know that John died on 16 Sep 2008. I am amazed to discover that some historical/genealogical societies merely put the date (without the day) of the newspaper for the clipped obit for their archives. Following “Lauri’s” suggestion would be another way to solve this documentation issue.